Year Zero: Unpacking Pol Pot, S-21, and the Cambodian Genocide
This blog is going to be a little different than others I have written on this site. Usually, I focus on things to do and see in the cities, but after arriving in Phnom Penh, visiting S-21, and learning about the Killing Fields, I felt compelled to write a more detailed breakdown of what happened. It was just too much to cram into my standard Phnom Penh city guide, though I do touch on it briefly there.
Before I got here, I really only had a passing knowledge that there was a brutal genocide in Cambodia led by some guy named Pol Pot, and that it was somehow related to "communism-bad."
Standing at S-21 prison and the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center changed that and made me want to dig deeper. Now, when most people say "The Killing Fields," Choeung Ek is what they mean, but it is really just a general term for over 19,000 execution and mass burial sites scattered all over Cambodia.
Entire books and college courses have been written on this, and I encourage you to read them, I know I will be. But I wanted to share a brief overview of what I learned so you can understand why visiting these sites hit me as hard as it did.
What happened in Cambodia was arguably the second biggest modern genocide in history. And when I say modern, I do mean MODERN. The main events of this happened from 1975 to 1979. This information just floored me. I really never thought about the possibility of it being so recent. That was right before I was born. My parents were in high school, and there are vendors selling food and wares here right now who were young adults when it happened.
Now, of course I don't mean to lessen what happened during the Holocaust in Germany, but that was over eighty years ago. The Holocaust was actually closer in time to the American Civil War and slavery than it is to present day. It just felt like that was a completely different era of human brutality, and that by the last quarter of the 20th century, humanity had settled into a gentler era.
Who Was Pol Pot and What Was the Khmer Rouge
Before April of 1975, most Cambodians had no idea who Pol Pot was. He was born Saloth Sar and was a French-educated radical who took control of a communist guerrilla group called the Khmer Rouge. I write "radical" because that is what the history books say, but in my opinion, he was terrifyingly fucking insane, and I'll get into why a little later.
Now, there is more backstory that I'm not going to get into, Cambodia had already been in a civil war since 1967, but at its core, Pol Pot's goal was to reset Cambodian society back to what he called "Year Zero." He wanted to completely erase 2,000 years of Cambodian history, abolish money, private property, religion, and schools, and essentially turn the entire country into a self-dependent labor colony.
April 17th 1975: The Fall of Phnom Penh
This was what would be the "day that would live in infamy" for Cambodia. Early that morning, about 60,000 Khmer Rouge soldiers marched into Phnom Penh, forcing the government army to surrender. It didn't take days or weeks—by 9:00 AM, the city was pretty much under their control.
At first, the 2 million citizens of Phnom Penh were celebrating because most were tired, poor refugees, and they thought this meant the war was over. But the illusion of peace didn't last long. Within a matter of hours, they realized something was terribly wrong. The soldiers weren't smiling or celebrating with them.
The Khmer Rouge started evacuating the city, saying it was a temporary three-day measure because American bombs were inbound. But it didn't calm any fears, nor did many buy that excuse because of how the orders were enforced.
Soldiers were firing in the air and pointing guns at families. They were clearing hospitals by force and wheeling the sick into the streets. Citizens were not allowed to take any belongings, and families that were separated weren't allowed to reunite. By sunset on April 17th, hundreds of thousands of people were marched out of the capital, and they knew this wasn't a temporary safety measure.
They were then marched to different labor camps across rural areas. Thousands died on the way from malnutrition and dehydration in the brutal Cambodian heat.
And there was no grace period. People were put to work right away. Pol Pot had insanely unrealistic goals, like tripling the country's rice production overnight while working people to death to accomplish it.
This was also the first phase of targeted killings. Pretty much all former government officials were taken into the woods and executed on the march out—okay, I get that—but anyone displaying signs of Western influence or higher intelligence was targeted as well. Doctors, engineers, teachers, and people who spoke foreign languages were executed. Even people wearing eyeglasses, whom the regime associated with "reading," were eliminated.
This is also one of the many reasons I think Pol Pot was more than just a radical—he was clinically insane. From the start, his plan had zero chance of working. I've heard many people point to this as an example of why communism doesn't work, and while I don't support communism, to me this wasn't even that. It wasn't just "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Even Hitler and the Taliban had an achievable plan of action, no matter how awful it was, and worked toward it. Pol Pot's plan, on a long enough timeline, would eventually reduce the population to zero. I just can't understand how rosy his glasses needed to be to not see that.
And it gets worse. Much, much worse.
S-21 and Other Torture Camps and The Killing Fields
Now, there wasn't really a "slow start" to the genocide, but the way people were killed and why it happened evolved over time.
First off were the obvious ones in the first month or so: former soldiers, police officers, and such. While brutal, I get it. I do. If you want to take over a country, it's probably not a bad idea to get rid of those people.
Over the next 18 months or so came the labor camp purges. Killing fields were set up right next to them. People who couldn't meet quotas, people who got sick, and even people caught picking fruit off trees were taken to these fields and killed, often beaten to death to save bullets.
All of that is awful enough. But again, looking at it through the eyes of someone wanting to secure absolute control, saving bullets and getting rid of unproductive workers, you can understand the cold logic, if you look at it through the eyes of an evil ruler.
But then he just starts to go off the fucking rails. When the impossible rice quotas couldn't be met, he very much took a "shoot the messenger" approach when informed about failures. So, OBVIOUSLY, the messengers started lying. But now his reports say they have met the rice quota, but alas, there just isn't that much rice to be found.
It seems like there were only two possible conclusions he could have come to: either his subjects were lying because it was an impossible goal, OR spies from the CIA, KGB, and Vietnam had infiltrated and were sabotaging his revolution. He obviously went with the latter choice and decided to weed out these agents through torture.
But this brings me back to a question I keep coming back to: WHY? To me, it just seems like pure psychopathy. Some say torture doesn't work at all. Jack Bauer would disagree, and if I'm being pragmatic, I'd say it has its place. But on the scale he did it and HOW he did it, he couldn't possibly think it was yielding any real results.
Again, just editorializing and being pragmatic here, if I'm charging in and taking over a country, I get killing anyone you even suspect of being a dissident. That way you maintain power and rule by fear. But taking a malnourished 90lb worker from the field, accusing him of working with the CIA, torturing him until he admits it, and then torturing him some more accomplishes nothing.
"Throw her in the river, if she's a witch she'll float, if not she'll drown" logic.
Who knows? I guess that's what fanaticism is. I just find it hard to wrap my head around. In the end, he even started turning on his own inner circle and putting them in the same prisons, and I have a hard time understanding how after enough of that, it didn't result in an immediate forced change of leadership.
January 1979: Vietnam Steps in
The nightmare finally ended in January 1979, when Vietnam stepped in.
Now to pause a minute, one tragic part of this whole thing is that none of the rest of the world stepped in to help. There were all kinds of Cold War politics still going on that made everyone nervous to intervene. The Khmer Rouge even held Cambodia's seat in the UN. In fact, one of the most fucked-up parts of the whole thing is that they still held that seat until 1990. That is TWO GODDAMN YEARS after the Choeung Ek Memorial was built. So while mass graves were being unearthed and a country was being rebuilt, the United Nations still allowed the assholes responsible a seat at the table.
In fact, it was Pol Pot's own dumbassery that even caused Vietnam to step in. Not only did he fail at tripling food production, but he was running out of even basic resources needed to keep things running (which tends to happen when you slaughter your workforce). So the Khmer Rouge started raiding Vietnamese territory for supplies, and Vietnam was having none of that bullshit. Vietnam invaded Cambodia on December 25, 1978, and in about two weeks, on January 7, 1979, they captured Phnom Penh, driving Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge out of the capital and ending the genocide.
Even though Vietnam should be considered heroes for this, because politics can be complete and utter bullshit, many nations, including the US, condemned the invasion as an illegal occupation. I just don't get that, because to me, as soon as a single foreign soldier crosses your border and attacks your country, all bets are off and you have free reign to wipe their entire army out.
The Continued Civil War and the Fate of Pol Pot
While life did return to a semblance of normalcy for Cambodia after 1979, jungle skirmishes between Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge did continue for almost another twenty years.
This led to some extremely short-sighted decisions by both sides that haunt Cambodia to this day: the use of anti-personnel land mines. Millions of them were placed and are still active in the area, posing a danger even now.
Unfortunately, I wish I could say Vietnam or the newly freed Cambodia re-organized, hunted Pol Pot down, and executed him by shoving a bunch of spiky things up his ass until he died, he was never really brought to justice.
He lived in exile near the Thai border with the rest of the Khmer Rouge troops until one last act of crazy paranoia finally caused his own people to turn on him. In June 1997, he became afraid that one of his commanders, Son Sen, was negotiating with the Cambodian government, so he ordered the execution of Son Sen and 13 members of his family, including young children.
After this, his top commander arrested him and put him on "trial" in front of several international journalists. He was placed under lifelong house arrest in a jungle hut. Not long after that, though, there were radio reports saying he might be turned over to an international court. It was reported that he died in his sleep of heart failure, but many think it was suicide. His body was quickly burned on top of some old garbage and car tires, so no one really knows for sure.
Great article. I didn't know....